Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday October 22, 2011 @05:37PM
from the aber-nicht-ganz-perfekt dept.

First time accepted submitter howzit writes "German paleontologists have discovered what they believe is the best-preserved dinosaur skeleton ever found. The flesh-eating member of the theropod subgroup, which walked on its hind legs, is about 98 percent complete, and also includes preserved bits of skin. 'The around 135-million-year-old fossil is of outstanding scientific importance.'"

It happens if the dead body is immediately covered by an air tight layer of e.g. sand, tar or mud. So you find many well preserved fossils in former swamps, river banks or tar pits. In this case it seems to have been preserved by sinking in the seabed of the Paratethys, part of the Tethys, which was an ocean between Africa and Eurasia, and whose remainings are the contemporan Mediterran.

The story is rather light on detail, but the location given is along strike from the location of the Solnhofen limestone outcrops and quarries that have yielded (amongst others), the specimens of Archaeopteryx.

IF this is an appropriate correlation, then the environment of deposition is likely to have been an intermittently stratified and anoxic lagoon of brackish water with active deposition of (phytoplanktonic) carbonate. Storm- or flood-driven overturning events are thought to have lead to intermittent d

People loan such finds to museums rather than donating outright so that they retain some control over how the find is maintained, displayed, and so on. If the museum does a poor job of maintaining the fossil or puts it in some back closet where the public can't see it, one would like to be able to take it back and loan it to a museum that will treat it better.

Plenty of things are loaned out (See what NASA does alot) simply so they retain their rights over the product while still allowing it to be showcased (recognition) or allowed to be further researched. Generally speaking, this is standard practice for stuff like these. The main reason is, that the person maintain control over who gets to see it and where it's located and under what conditions. One example is that instead of a museum owning it and showing it only in 1 city, a person may loan out the bones to

Well, it was found in Bavaria after all. Our state's motto could as well be "Get off my lawn!" - so our traditions might be derived in an unbroken chain from a long lost dinosaur high culture... And, by the way, proper Lederhosen are made from deer skin. Dinosaur leather is for tourists and Prussians. Period. Now get off my lawn! (Or, to put it in proper Bavarian - "Schleich Di!")

The "skin" is still fossilized, but you can see the texture and possibly structure of it. It's not preserved in the way you're thinking. Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.

A fossil like this is rare and worth a decent amount. Collectors will pay obscene amounts for it, amounts that a museum may not be able to match. So just be happy they loaned it to a museum at all, so at least we can glean some scientific knowledge from it.

A fossil like this is rare and worth a decent amount. Collectors will pay obscene amounts for it, amounts that a museum may not be able to match. So just be happy they loaned it to a museum at all, so at least we can glean some scientific knowledge from it.

Some good news on that front, from the article:

"The fossil, discovered between one and two years ago, has been registered as a German cultural asset, giving it a status that drastically lowers its monetary worth, but ensures the artefact will remain in the country.

it's very common for artifacts and pcs of artwork to be on loan to a museum or other institution. Typically they are loaned in perpetuity, for a century( or other long period) or until the owner dies, when commonly the item is willed to the museum, or it is willed to another but only if they agree to leave it with the museum. technically, the person or persons who own the object retain ownership but are not responsible for insuring it or for it's upkeep/ repair, that becomes the responsibility of the muse

Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.

Not exactly, I don't remember the specifics exactly, but it wasn't soft matter itself. It was either fossilized itself or only the successor chemicals to like hemoglobin or such like that. (There are some YouTube videos that talk about it, probably try C0nc0rdance [youtube.com]). I know this detail because some creationists bring it up as a statement of "oh, well, this stuff breaks up in only a couple thousand years, so obviously the remains couldn't be as old as scientists claim it to be." Don't worry about being misled

Also.... "loaned" to a museum?
For crying out loud, why? Give it to them, sell it to them, or whatever...

The reason is very simple. If you loan it to them then they can't turn around and sell the parts off to make money (fund raising) or decide its not worth the time and just throw it away or do anything that might destroy it. You will basically not get it back unless they say they no longer want it, then you find another museum who might want it.

Obviously, 'scientific made a msiatke, as Eearth was created in 6000 yrs.
Source: Conservapedia [conservapedia.com]
[/irony]
This post was here to show a type of (unexpected) reaction to this type of news nowadays.

No no no.... the earth wasn't created in 6000 years. It was created in 6 days (7 if you count vacation days). The apparent much greater age arises from the universe being created in an "adult" state so that it would be ready to utilize for the life forms to be placed within, not to deceive the life forms within, but to simply be utilizable. Adam and Eve, for example, were created as fully formed adults, it is ludicrous to think that the universe itself would not be. Because we associate that maturity with actual time passing, we perceive that the earth is much older than it is... so if we believe the universe to be many millions of years old because of how old it appears, we are actually deceiving ourselves - it is not God who deceives us.

No. Adam would not remember his parents because he never had any. Even a mere instant after his creation, he would have appeared to absolutely any amount of physiological study to be a fully matured adult, and absolutely no degree of scrutiny would be able to detect otherwise. He was physically mature, with the ability to reason, to communicate coherently, and to cognitively understand his surroundings, all properties that today we only acquire through time and experience. One key difference between h

Personally, I am an Old Earth Creationist and consider Genesis to be largely allegorical (though, I do believe Adam and Eve actually existed, as "metaphysical clones", if you will, from a pre-existing population of humans per se), but I do find this "per the laws of physics, the apparent artifacts of time must be present for a viable physical structure" position to be able to be taken remarkably far...

The creation of the universe is something wholly outside of all human experience, and no person who was ever born has ever had any personal knowledge or experience of anything coming out of nothing, so it's not really unreasonable for anyone to conclude that a nebula is actually many billions of years old based on that experience... But rational or not, such a conclusion based solely on that experience is really nothing more than rationalized self-deception.

It is also true that no person who was ever born has ever had any personal knowledge or experience of any impossible state of affairs. That does not make any impossible thing more possible just because we don't know what it would be like to experience that impossible thing. Or, indeed, help us work out which impossible thing would be more likely.

How about you work out a consensus "God(s) made everything we see just like so" story with all the other religions than the one you happen to cleave to? Because,

Are you willfully neglecting the phrase "and the evening and the morning were the first day" in your analysis of what "day" means? Or do you have equally flexible definitions of evening and morning put together to make epochs rather than a single day?

Sigh. Conservapedia's entire science section should be hauled out behind the barn and shot. They're doing everything they can to reinforce the stereotype of the anti-science conservative (which the a lot aren't, though you'd never know it from the stereotyping that goes on here).

That said, they tend to be better than Wikipedia on certain topics, such as the history of the Cold War. On wikipedia, consensus dictates that the "Red Scare" had no basis in reality, was nothing but a w

The arms in theropods are like avian wings in that for most species they are in a rigid clapping position. There was a Slashdot article about this some time ago. Actually clapping doesn't quite describe it as you'll find ancient bird fossils have their claws facing forwards just like this one.
The "damaged" hip is actually one of the two main features used to tell a theropod away from other dinosaurs. The theropods ischium is facing backwards, while their illium faces forwards. This is the ancestral configuration, although it was secondarily lost in the species most closely related to birds, which have *both* facing backwards,
Plant-eating Ornithischia, like the Triceratops, on the other hand, evolved that "new" hip configuration much earlier.

Which of course brings up another issue entirely that their God is a deceitful character. You get the idea that he's a very unsavory individual from reading the Old Testament. And if you read the entire text of both the old and new Testaments, you see a definitive change in their God. In essence in the latter God takes back seat to Jesus.

There is one other thing that irritates me about the religious dominionists/fundamentalists. It's the fact that the vast majority of them have never read the entire tex